New Psychoactive Substances in Wastewater from Rest Areas and Commercial Weigh Stations along Interstate Highways

[NNadir]

From the land of Mitch McConnell, who brought down the United States by manipulating Supreme Court nominations to put criminally corrupt politicized freaks on said court:

New Psychoactive Substances in Wastewater from Rest Areas and Commercial Weigh Stations along Interstate Highways Bikram Subedi, Durga Prasad Kodati, Abhya Niegocki, Anna O’Shea Stites, and Chris Delcher Environmental Science & Technology 2025 59 (45), 24302-24309

New psychoactive substances (NPSs), synthetic designer compounds that mimic the effects of traditional controlled drugs, represent an emerging and ongoing threat to public health and safety worldwide. (1) A total of 1,349 NPSs have been globally identified including a wide range of chemical formulations with varying potencies, with synthetic cathinones accounting for 25%, followed by synthetic cannabinoids (21%) and opioids (18%). (2) In forensic toxicological or law enforcement-seized samples, the European Union reported approximately 30,000 NPS-involved cases in 2021, while the United States Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) reported 13,367 cases in 2022. (3,4) In Kentucky, the National Forensic Laboratory Information System (NFLIS) reported 1,171 identifications of NPS in 2022, which is 8.8% of the national total NPS identifications. (5) However, conventional surveillance from biological samples or administrative records─such as those collected during emergency department visits, autopsies from coroner’s offices, and seized samples by law enforcement─offers limited information on the true prevalence of NPSs, with limited temporal and geospatial resolution. Despite suffering from a limited scope and population biases, primarily due to the criminalization and stigmatization of drug use, community-based drug-checking programs have recently emerged as an expedient strategy to monitor shifts in the local drug supply and provide evidence-based information to enable informed decision-making and the implementation of effective interventions. (6,7)

Wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) provides a comprehensive, noninvasive, and near-real-time trend in NPS use in defined communities based on the quantified level of NPS or their biomarkers in raw wastewater. (8) Several synthetic cathinones including methcathinone, eutylone, methylenedioxypyrovalerone (MDPV), α-PVP, and 3- or 4-methylmethcathinone (3- or 4-MMC) were quantified in WBE studies covering 60% of the Australian population. (9,10) 20 European cities, (11) China, (12) and Korea. (13) However, very few studies reported synthetic cannabinoids, fentanyl, and/or fentanyl analogs in wastewater. Four synthetic cannabinoids including ADB-BUTINACA and MDMB-4en-PINACA were detected in wastewater from 31 major cities across China. (14) Our report of NPS including synthetic opioids (carfentanil and furanyl fentanyl), synthetic cannabinoids (MAB-CHMINACA), synthetic cathinones, and meta-chlorophenyl piperazine (mCPP) in rural communities in Southern Illinois is the only WBE study on these drugs in the U.S. (8)

Many NPS including methylone, mephedrone, α-PVP, methcathinone, methoxy fentanyl, buphedrone, pentedrone, flephedrone, butylone, eutylone, and MDPV were detected but not quantified in several quantitative or qualitative suspect screening studies in China, U.S., Australia, and Europe. (8,12,15−20) Carfentanil, with a single lethal dose of less than 1 μg, is over 100-fold more potent than fentanyl (0.1–0.2 mg per dose) and 10,000-fold more potent than morphine (10–30 mg). (21,22) Similarly, the per-capita water flow (domestic, industrial, and even stormwater in some cases) to municipal sewer systems is significantly higher (564 ± 388 L/day/people) (23−25) than at seven facilities along interstate highways over our 12-month study period (16.3 ± 11.9 L/day/people) (Table S1). Therefore, wastewater surveillance at relatively less diluted sites, such as rest areas, can potentially help detect and quantify more NPS, and it can serve as a regional early warning system for NPS.

This study addresses a research gap by quantifying NPSs in wastewater samples collected from rest areas and commercial weigh stations along interstate highways in Kentucky and represents the first study reporting NPS among general and commercial highway commuters. Target NPSs were selected based on recent identifications on forensic reports and global-scale WBE studies that include two synthetic opioids [p-fluorofentanyl (pFF) and metonitazene], two synthetic cannabinoids [ADB-BUTINACA and MAB-CHMINACA], a phenylpiperazine (mCPP), an indole-based alkaloid (mitragynine), and ten synthetic cathinones [ethylone, butylone, N-ethylhexylone, N-ethylhexedrone, α-pyrrolidinopropiophenone, α-piperidinobutiophenone, 4-MMC, 4-chloro-α-PVP, 3,4-methylenedioxypyrovalerone (MDPV), and 2-methyl-4-(methylthio)-2-morpholinopropiophenone (MMMP)] (Figure S1)...

Wow. I must be getting old. I had no idea that so many synthetic psychoactive compounds existed.

Of course, under the current government, one often feels that one must be hallucinating. One would actually hope so, thinking the reign of the orange pedophile is just a "bad trip."

[Inkey]

1. A Brave New World

A new chemistry catagory is being developed. I have seen this occur throughout my lifetime several times already. For better, but probably worse we will see this happen again .....

[multigraincracker]

2. Boss man says, you got to pee in the cup.

[modrepub]

4. Funny You Say That

Neighbor winds up doing his brother's company's "random" drug test because he's clean. If they actually tested their personnel, they'd probably have to fire lots of their workers and most companies don't want to have that much turnover.

A couple years back our garbage collection company changed hands and we started missing collections. The new company sent out email apologizing that garbage wasn't being collected because they lost a lot of drivers and crew when the company changed hands. Turns out the old company was self insured (and never drug tested). The new company instituted random drug tests (because of their insurance) and they lost half their staff. Illegal drug use is apparently quite common for the front line garbage collectors, which makes sense given the 3AM wake up and long days most of them work.

Drug use is much more common than most people think. After decades of drug testing, companies and employees have figured ways around it I guess.

[Old Crank]

3. Lots of questions without reading the scientific paper.

Any estimates on numbers of drivers using?
Impossible to tell where users came from since this is an interstate.
How long does the effect stay in the driver's system. Alcohol is a few hours. Pot is delectable much longer, with no high.

It is good to find out what is being used out there.

[NNadir]

7. The analysis was conducted using wastewater, which does not differentiate sources of urine.

There are a lot of drugs involved - more than I would have imagined even existed. Quite possibly they were tested under ad hoc conditions based on medicinal chemistry principles. (Often in drug discovery for legitimate drugs; people make a number of fairly minor modifications to the structure to view effects.) I know for a fact that this approach has been utilized for psychoactive drugs both legitimately and illegitimately. Examples are amphetamine, methamphetamine, and Ritalin (methylphenidate) all of which have an aromatic ring with a an alkyl side chain having a primary or secondary amine in the 2 position.

These examples are all stimulants of course, and would certainly be of use to people on long trips.

Some of the hallucinogenic analogues also exhibit these features. The drug mescaline is an example, where the phenyl ring is substituted with three methoxygroups, and "ecstasy," which is an formyl acetal of dihydroxyamphetamine, "MDA," methylene dioxyamphetamine. In both cases, there is an alkyl side chain with an amine in the 2-position with respect to the aromatic ring.

Similarly, there are different forms of lysergic acid amides. (The diethylamide is LSD). The desalkyl amide of LSD, ergine, is hallucinogenic and was known to native Americans as ololiuhqui; it's a component of morning glory seeds. These moieties are generally derivatives of the amino acid tryptophan, which has a structure containing an indole ring system, as are some of the soporific sleep aids. (I'm an insomniac, and on particularly bad nights I will take zolpidem, (Ambien) which is an isostere of melatonin, the natural sleep inducing OTC compound. This is probably why drinking milk can help one to sleep. Milk is rich in tryptophan. This drug, zolpidem, can be subject to abuse; and as such, I ask my wife to control my access since when I was a "jet setting executive" I began to develop bad habits in using it It can induce a stupor in which one is not aware that one has already taken a dose. I started taking it on trips to Europe to adjust to the time change. There was a point it got out of control. I now use it maybe a few times a month, and in such a way that I know that I have done so.)

The short acting hallucinogen, DMT, dimethyl tryptamine is derived is in this class. So is psilocybin.

The pharmacokinetics of only a small subset of designer drugs are likely to be known, and only in cases where they were subject to human clinical trials. Thus the length of time that they are active is probably not known for most of them.

I would imagine that many, if not all, exhibit rather profound side effects with repeated use and even singular use.

It's a bad idea to take psychoactive compounds and drive; it's generally a bad idea to take psychoactive compounds of any kind under any circumstances if one can avoid it.

This said, a few clinical trials have explored hallucinogens for the treatment of depression. There's some evidence that they are effective in this way, but only for a subset of people. I encouraged my nephew, who is depressive, occasionally suicidal, to register for clinical trials of hallucinogenic isosteres. Happily he found an approved pharmaceutical drug that helps him to manage his depression; he's doing well and so there's no need to explore clinical trials. Our family is relieved; we love that young man.

[Old Crank]

8. I understand that

But the OP sounded like he was blaming or indicating this was McConnell s fault. When there is no way of knowing what percentage of use of these facilities are by people from Kentucky.
That being said, drug policies pushed by the GOP probably have some bearing on drug use/abuse in the US.

[Layzeebeaver]

5. Don't worry, I've got this under control!

[Warpy]

6. Brought to you by the War on Drugs

All that bit of stupidity did was bring us a whole host of semisynthetic, synthetic, and far worse drugs.